Torrey Conference ended up being pretty good, session-wise. I've gotten nowhere near enough work, done, though, as I thought would happen.

All of the speakers had good style and pretty good messages. None of them were perfect, of course. One gave an exposition of Romans 1-11 in order to do Romans 12. It was really good, as he layed out completely a reading of Romans that comes straight out of Luther. That was an enjoyable trip down the backbone of Protestant theology, even if it's hard for me to understand.

I'm convinced there is a forensic element to justification, but I'm not convinced that's all there is. It seems to me there must be a change of soul in order for God's knowledge of us to remain correct. So, are regeneration and justification really different things?

We also had a pleasant Calvinist exposition on Ephesians 2:8 Thursday night that was thrown into a sermon on sovereignty largely to irritate the Wesleyans and Armenians in the crowd, as the speaker admitted. As I tend in the Wesleyan direction I knew he was poking at me, but I wasn't really bothered. I'm not bothered by God's sovereignty and I don't see the verse saying what he thinks it says.

Today's sessions were somewhat poor. The last session was a sparsely attended worship session that I wasn't all that inspired by. My taste in worship has changed somewhat dramatically since I regularly attended Calvary. I just don't speak that language from the heart anymore. The liturgy appeals to me more. But I don't think that the worship service was awful. It was mainly a taste issue (based on what I think are probably real issues in the worship movement). He definitely was from Orange County, though. He really spoke the dialect. There's an intonation that's so typically Orange County, mainly, especially in the South/Central OC young white people subculture.